Submarine Cultures Perform Long-term Robotic Exploration of Unconventional Environmental Niches

 

 

Name: SUBMARINE CULTURES PERFORM LONG-TERM ROBOTIC EXPLORATION OF UNCONVENTIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL NICHES
Acronym: subCULTron
Funding scheme: RIA - Research and Innovation action, H2020-EU.1.2.2. - FET Proactive
Grant Agreement Number: 640967
Total budget: € 3 987 650,75
Start and end dates: 01.04.2015. – 31.8.2019.
Coordinator: University of Graz – Artificial Life Lab (AT)
Partners: University of Graz – Artificial Life Lab (AT), Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE), CYBERTRONICA RESEARCH Research Center of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science (DE), ARMINES: Co-leader of Artificial systems and Bioinspired behaviours (FR), SSSA Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (IT), UNIZG-FER University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (HR), CORILA: Consortium for coordination of research activities concerning the Venice lagoon system (IT)

Project website: http://www.subcultron.eu/
Social media: https://twitter.com/subCULTron


Abstract

The project subCULTron aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a complex environment: the Lagoon of Venice. The heterogeneous system we are developing consists of 3 different agent types: aMussels, aFish and aPads. Artificial mussels (aMussels) are the collective long-term memory of the system, allowing information to stay beyond the runtime of other agents. These mussels monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial incrustation of the environment and fish. On the water surface, artificial lilypads (aPads) interface with the human society, delivering energy and information from the outside world. Between those two layers, artificial fish (aFish) move/monitor/explore the environment and exchange information with the mussels and lilypads.

subCULTron swarm concept

 

1. Excellence

subCULTron aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy.

Our heterogeneous system consists of 3 different agent types:

  • On the seabed, artificial mussels are the collective long-term memory of the system, allowing information to stay beyond the runtime of other agents, thus allowing to continue learning from previously learned states. These mussels monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial incrustation and fish.
  • On the water surface, artificial lily pads interface with the human society, delivering energy and information influx from ship traffic or satellite data.
  • Between those two layers, artificial fish move/monitor/explore the environment and exchange info with the mussels and lily pads. Artificial mussels are a novel class of underwater agents.

The poject aimed to push forward the edge of knowledge with novel sensors (electric sense/electro-communication), novel bio-inspired algorithms (underwater hives) and novel energy harvesting in underwater scenarios. Our application field is a human- and animal-co-inhabited real-world environment of high impact: Venice canals & lagoon. These habitats are highly dynamic and structured, expected to be reflected by a spatial self-structuring of our mussel population. These sub-populations locally perform memetic or cultural learning algorithms on their specific local data. Thus our cultural evolution algorithms will promote sub-culture development, similar to the human society that does the same above the water level in parallel.

Overall, we aim for an artificial society underneath the water's surface working to benefit a human society above water.

 

2. Impact

A heterogeneous robotic swarm of over 130 agents was developed and tested within the scope of the project, with many novel algorithms applied to it.

The subCULTron project concerns itself with developing an underwater monitoring and exploration system and deploying it on an unsupervised mission of long-term marine monitoring and exploration. The subCULTron multi-agent system was envisioned as an artificial marine ecosystem. It is heterogeneous and consists of three agent types: five Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) called artificial lily pads (aPads), a small swarm of highly mobile artificial fish (aFish), and more than 100 underwater sensor nodes called artificial mussels (aMussels). aPads were designed as communication mediators between underwater robots and the surface and due to higher computational power as power and data hubs. Furthermore, they can relocate and charge surfaced underwater agents on demand. aMussels were designed as a low-cost long autonomy underwater sensor hub capable of vertical motion. Their goal is to continuously monitor the underwater environment while communicating collected data using short- or long-range communication interfaces. aFish is a robot similar to aMussel, with the capability of lateral movement at the expense of shorter autonomy. Their goal is to explore the environment outside the current deployment area. During exploration they also exchange necessary info with other agents in the swarm using short- or long-range communication interfaces.

 

Developed robotic agents. Left to right: aPad, aMussel, aFish.

 

New technologies were developed used for communication and precepting the robots surroundings based on electric capacitance. Promising new approaches were pursued in prolonging robots autonomy by utilizing bacteria found on the sea bottom. During the project, many algorithms emerged in order to tackle the outlined problems. With so many robots in the swarm, aPads need to decide in which order should underwater robots be collected. Resolving such problems in a scalable manner yielded in development of the hyper-heuristic approach to the high-level mission control problem. Information consensus algorithms were used to keep collective swarm knowledge consistent and to maintain the spatial formation of surface vehicles in the environment with external disturbances. Many swarm algorithms were developed to tackle exploration of the unknown underwater area.

 

3. Implementation - Goals and Achievements

During the project development, many workshops were organised with the goal of integration of the separately developed subsystems into the robots themselves. Additionally, training activities were used for interdisciplinary knowledge transfer between the partners or experts in the field. Extensive fieldwork was performed, and realistic datasets were collected in situ.

Some of the many events and field trials that took place include:

 

Early RTOS workshop, Jan 2016, Zagreb (Croatia)

Assembly workshop, Jul 2017, Zagreb (Croatia)

 

Review meeting preparation, Sep 2016, Zagreb

Breaking the surface 2016, Oct 2016, Biograd na
Moru (Croatia)

 

EMRA 2017, Jul 2017, Girona (Spain)

Breaking the surface 2017, Oct 2017, Biograd na
Moru (Croatia)

 

1st Anoxia workshop, Jun 2018, Venice (Italy)

Breaking the surface 2018, Oct 2018, Biograd na
Moru (Croatia)

 

Press event, Sep 2017, Venice (Italy)

2nd Anoxia workshop, Jun 2019, Venice (Italy)

 

Some achievements in numbers:

Internal workshops and press outreach of the project include:

  • 5 + 8 internal workshops and training activities that encouraged interdisciplinary knowledge transfer between project partners

  • The project was represented through 285 media and press events consisting of printed and online articles, radio and audio broadcasts and TV features.

Scientific dissemination during the 4 years of the project consists of:

  • 10 + 8 Conferences attended

  • 13 + 17 peer reviewed scientific publications, of which 2 + 4 are journal papers

  • 3 invited lectures

  • 1 special session

  • 7 educational and training outreach events at international workshops: the International Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Maritime Robotics and Applications Breaking the Surface – BTS 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; and the Workshop on EU funded marine robotics research EMRA 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.